Caesurae. Paul Celan's Later Work

On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Paul Celan's Visit to Israel

12-14 November 2019
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Organized by
Prof. Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp)
Dr. Chiara Caradonna (Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University)
Ass. Prof. Paweł Piszczatowski (University of Warsaw)

In collaboration with

• The Department for German Language and Literature at the Hebrew University
• The Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• The Center for Literary Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German Literature and Cultural History
• The Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem
• The Institute of German Studies, University of Warsaw
• Österreichisches Kulturforum, Tel Aviv, Israel
• Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
• Deutschlandfunk

From September 30 until October 17, 1969, the poet Paul Celan visited Israel for the first and only time. He was welcomed by old friends from his birthplace Czernowitz and read his poems both in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was a profoundly significant journey for Celan, who had been living in exile in Paris since 1948, and one that he had intended to undertake for some time. Afterwards, in Paris, Celan wrote a dense series of poems reflecting upon the places, encounters, and contradictions he experienced in Israel, especially in Jerusalem. The city became, as he wrote in a letter, a “turn, a caesura in my life.” On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Paul Celan’s visit to Israel, renowned international scholars will gather at the Hebrew University to remember and reflect upon this “caesura”, and to illuminate aspects of Celan’s later work, to which still little attention has been devoted.